Mothers and Sons (3 page)

He studied Markey’s mouth for a second as he continued to roar, and then he moved in quickly with the pliers gripping hard on one of Markey’s upper back teeth on the left-hand side. Even though Markey instantly clamped his mouth shut in shock, the pliers held fast.

He began to loosen and pull at the tooth, worried now about the noise, the hysterical set of screams coming from Markey. He knew that the pliers had precisely a single tooth in their grip, but he could not understand the length of time it was taking to loosen and extract the tooth. In his own single visit to a dentist, when he had realized how simple and effective this would be, the tooth had come out very quickly.

Suddenly, instead of putting pressure on the pliers and trying to loosen the tooth, he yanked the tooth back and forward and then he pulled the pliers hard. Markey let out a howl. It was finished. The tooth was out. Webster, when he came to examine it, seemed almost as pale as Markey.

He took off Markey’s blindfold and showed him the tooth. He knew that it was important now not to let Markey go in a hurry, to keep him tied up, to let him bleed a bit as he talked to him quietly, letting him know that if anyone in the school ever touched him or Webster again, he would take out another tooth until Markey would only have gums left. But, he explained to Markey, if one of the brothers ever got word of what had happened, he would not take out teeth, he would go for Markey’s mickey. Did he understand? He moved the pliers down between Markey’s
legs and tightened them around his penis. He spoke gently as Markey sobbed. Did he understand, he asked him. Markey nodded. I can’t hear you, he said. Yes, Markey said, yes, I understand. He released the pliers and untied Markey, forcing him to walk back to the school with them as though they were friends.

From then on, the other boys in Lanfad were very afraid of him. Soon he felt unthreatened. He could, if he wanted, stop fights, or take the side of someone who was being bullied, or let a boy depend on him for a while. But it was always clear that this meant nothing to him, that he would always be ready to walk away, to drop someone, including Webster, whom he had to threaten in order to stop him from being his friend.

The brothers allowed him to work out on the bog and he loved that, the silence, the slow work, the long stretch of flatness to the horizon. And walking home tired at the end of the day. Then in his last year they allowed him to work in the furnace, and it was when he was working there – it must have been in the winter of his last year – that he realized something he had not known before.

There were no walls around Lanfad, but it was understood that anyone moving beyond a certain point would be punished. In the spring of each year, as the evenings became longer, boys would try to escape, making for the main road, but they would always be caught and brought back. All the cottages in the area seemed to have figures posted at the windows ready to report escaping boys to the brothers. Once, in his first year, two such boys were punished with the whole school watching, but that did not appear to deter others who wished to escape as well. If anything, it egged
them on. He found it hard to understand how people would escape without a plan, a definite way of getting unnoticed to Dublin, and maybe then to England.

That last winter two boys who were a year or two older than he was had had enough. They were in trouble almost every day and seemed afraid of nothing. He remembered them because he had spoken to them once about escaping, what he would do and where he would go. He became interested in the conversation because they said they knew where to get bicycles, and he believed that this was the only way to escape, to start cycling at midnight or one in the morning and go straight to the boat. He added, without thinking, that before he left he would like to stuff one or two of the brothers into the full blazing furnace. It would be easy enough to do, he said, if you had two other guys with you and you gagged the brother and moved fast. The blaze was strong enough, he said, that there would not be a trace of them. They would go up in smoke. If you were lucky, you could stuff four or five of them where the fuel normally went. No one would know a thing about it. You could start with one of the doddery old fellows. He said this in the same distant, deliberate way he said everything. He noticed the two boys looking at him uneasily as it struck him that he had said too much. As he stood up abruptly and walked away, it struck him that he should not have done this either. He was sorry that he had spoken to them at all.

In the end the two boys escaped without bicycles and without a plan and they were brought back. He heard about it as he was bringing a bucket of turf up to the brothers’ refectory. Brother Lawrence stopped him and told him. He
nodded and went on. At supper he saw that the two boys were still not there. He supposed that they were being kept somewhere. After supper, as usual, he went down to the furnace.

It was a while later, close to lights-out time, when he was crossing the path to get more turf, that he heard a sound. He knew instantly what it was, it was the sound of someone being hit and crying. He could not make out at first where it was coming from, but then he understood that it was happening in the games room. He saw the lights were on, but the windows were too high for him. He walked back stealthily to the furnace to fetch a stool; he put it down under the window. When he looked in he saw that the boys who had tried to escape were face down on an old table with their trousers around their ankles and they were being beaten across the buttocks by Brother Fogarty with a strap. Brother Walsh was standing beside the table holding down with his two hands the one who was being beaten.

Suddenly, as he watched this scene, he noticed something else. There was an old light-box at the back of the games room. It was used to store junk. Now there were two brothers standing in it, and the door was open so they had a clear view of the two boys being punished. He could see them from the window – Brother Lawrence and Brother Murphy – realizing that the two brothers administering the punishment must have been aware of their presence too but perhaps could not see what they were doing.

They were both masturbating. They had their eyes fixed on the scene in front of them – the boy being punished, crying out each time he was hit with the strap. He could
not remember how long he watched them for. Before this, he had hated it when boys around him were punished. He had hated his own powerlessness amid the silence and the fear. But he had almost come to believe that these punishments were necessary, part of a natural system of discipline in which the brothers were in charge. Now he knew that there was something else involved, something which he could not understand, which he could not bring himself to think about. The image had stayed in his head as though he had taken a photograph of it: the two brothers in the light-box did not look like men in charge, they looked more like old dogs panting.

H
E LAY BACK
on the sofa knowing that he was going over all this again as a way of not thinking about the paintings. He stood up and stretched and scratched himself and then walked out onto the balcony again. Something beyond him, he felt, was beckoning; he wanted to leave his mind blank, but he was afraid. He knew that if he had done the robbery alone he would dump the paintings, burn them, leave them on the side of the road. When he was finally let out of Lanfad, he brought with him the feeling that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that the person on display was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else. There were always layers and beyond them even more secret layers which you could chance upon or which would become more apparent the closer you looked.

Somewhere in the city, or in some other city, there was someone who knew how to offload these paintings, get the money and divide it up. If he thought about it enough, if he sat back on the sofa and concentrated, would he know too? Every time he considered it, however, he came to a dead end. There had to be a way. He asked himself if he could go to the others who took part in the robbery – and they were so proud of themselves that night, everything had gone perfectly – and explain the problem. But he had never explained anything to anyone before. Word would get around that he was weakening. And also, if he could not work this out, then they certainly could not. They were only good at doing what they were told.

He studied the waste ground in front of the flats. There was still nobody. He wondered if the cops had decided that they did not need to watch him, that he would make mistakes now without any encouragement from them. Yet that was not how their minds worked, he thought. When he saw a cop, or a barrister, or a judge, he saw the brothers in Lanfad, somebody loving their authority, using it, displaying their power in a way which only barely disguised hidden and shameful elements. He walked back into the flat and over to the sink in the kitchen, turned on the cold tap and splashed his face with water.

Maybe, he thought, it was all simpler than he imagined. These Dutchmen would come, he would take them to see the paintings, they would agree to pay him, he would drive them to where they had left the money. And then? Why not just take the money from them and forget about the paintings? But the Dutchmen must have thought of that
too. Perhaps they would threaten him and make clear that, if he broke any agreement, they would have him shot. Nonetheless, he was not afraid of them.

He could not decide if the Dutchmen were a trap or not. He sat down and found that he would do anything now to avoid thinking that led to no conclusion. He trusted no one. That thought gave him strength, and he went on to feel almost proud that he felt love for no one – maybe love was not the word – but he felt no need to protect anyone. Except, he thought, his daughter Lorraine, she was two now. Everything about her was beautiful and he looked forward to waking in the morning and finding that she was awake too and waiting for him to come and pick her up. He liked it when she was asleep upstairs. He wanted her to be happy and secure. He did not feel this about his other children. He had felt the same, however, about his younger brother Billy, but Billy was killed in a robbery, stabbed with a knife and left to bleed to death. So he supposed that he did not really feel much about Billy anymore, he knew how to stop his mind thinking about him.

If he could get rid of these paintings he would be fine, he thought. He could go back to normal. Maybe he should take a risk with these Dutchmen, try to work out a way to get the money from them in exchange for the paintings without any further complications. But, he thought, he mustn’t do that. He must be very careful.

H
E DID NOT
drink and did not like bars, but the hotel he had told Mousey to put the Dutchmen into had a quiet bar and a good side entrance close to the car park. Nonetheless,
he felt unsafe, watching a loudly dressed American woman at the bar ordering a drink and wondering for a moment if she were a cop. He caught her eye and glanced away as quickly as he could. From the cops’ point of view, he thought, it made sense to send a woman dressed like an American into the bar. It would also make sense for Mousey Furlong to make a deal with the cops, set this up as a first step towards rehabilitation. Soon, he thought, Mousey’s wife would open a crèche or a posh off-licence with all his heroin money and they would raise funds for charity when Christmas came round. On the other hand, the American woman might just be a tourist and Mousey might not have changed very much.

When the two Dutchmen came, he recognized them instantly. He had never been out of Ireland in his life and he had never, to his knowledge, met anyone Dutch before. But these were Dutch, he thought, they just looked Dutch. They could not have been anything else. He nodded at them. They would recognize him, too, he supposed.

He wrote on a piece of paper ‘Stay here’ and handed it to the skinnier one as soon as he sat down. He put his finger to his lips. Then he walked out into the car park and sat into his car. That would give them something to think about, he imagined, Dutch or not. The car park was empty. He watched out for the slightest movement, but no one appeared, no car came to park. He would wait here for a while more, having decided to resist the temptation to go and check out the front of the hotel and the lobby. It was important, he knew, to remain calm, to stay hidden, to make the minimum number of moves necessary. He did not play chess, but he had watched someone once playing
the game on television and he had liked how slow and careful and calculating they were.

They were both drinking coffee when he returned. He waited until the barman was out of sight and wrote on a piece of paper: ‘Is the money in Ireland?’ One of them nodded. ‘So?’ he wrote. ‘We need to see,’ came the reply. Then, having checked again that the barman was not within hearing distance, he said in an audible voice: ‘You need to check the paintings, I need to check the money.’

He tried to look controlling and menacing and wondered if the Dutch had a different way of doing this. Maybe, he thought, wearing glasses and being skinny and drinking coffee meant tough in Holland. They looked, in any case, professional. He motioned them to follow him out to the car park. He drove first to the North Circular Road and then down through Prussia Street to the quays. He crossed the river and made his way to Crumlin. No one in the car spoke. He hoped that his two companions did not know what part of the city they were in.

He drove down a side street and then a lane, turning into a garage whose door had been left open. He got out of the car and pulled down the sliding door of the garage. They were now in darkness. When he found a light and turned it on, he signalled to the Dutchmen to stay in the car. He went out of a door into a small yard and tapped on the kitchen window. Inside, three or four children sat around a table, a woman stood at a sink; the man standing beside her turned and said something. It was Joe O’Brien. The children rose at once and took their plates and cups and left the room without looking at the window. Joe, he realized, had
them well trained. The woman soon gathered up her things as well and left the kitchen.